and technical discoveries. When the concealed in this sense is brought into unconcealedness, there arise "the miracles of technology" and what is specifically "American."
These comments on the essential character of concealment and concealedness, considered fully, come down to this: we are here only broaching a realm whose fullness of essence we hardly surmise and certainly do not fathom, for we are outside the mode of experience proper to it. It would therefore also be an error to claim that the rich essence of concealedness could be gained just by counting the sundry modes of concealment, under the guidance of the various "word meanings." If we speak of "kinds" of concealment we do not mean that there would be a genus, "concealment in general," to which then, following the schema of the usual logical classification, various species and their sub-species and variations would be subordinated. The connection among the kinds of concealedness is a historical one, and the historical must be kept distinct from the "historiographical." The latter is information about and acquaintance with the historical, and indeed in a purely technical sense, i.e., it calculates by balancing the past against the present and vice versa. Everything historiographical takes direction from the historical. History, on the contrary, has no need of the historiographical. The historiographer is always just a technician, a journalist; the thinker of history is always quite distinct. Jacob Burckhardt is not a historiographer but a true thinker of history.
It has been our concern merely to show that unconcealedness does not have as its only "opposite" concealment in the sense of dissemblance and falsity but that there are other modes of concealment of a completely different order, bearing no trace of the "negativity" of falsity and distortion. With these remarks, the mystery can perhaps become more open, the mystery that in the metaphysics of the Occident falsity could attain status and priority as the only opposite to truth. For the present task of an elucidation of the essence of ἀλήθεια, our reference to the "species" of concealedness may be useful in helping us grasp sooner that mode of concealment constantly present for the Greeks but not questioned by them as to its essence, with the exception that for the Greeks already the very word denoting this concealment and its domain contains enough of its own elucidation.
Thus we come upon an astonishing thing: despite the fact that the modes of concealment having nothing in common with dissemblance, distortion, and deception pervade everything so essentially, yet they were not explicitly mentioned as modes of concealment. Perhaps it is only because they are so essential that they were not explicitly named. They appear therefore in each case already under the essential form of unconcealedness, which in a certain way retains within itself concealedness